Friday, September 03, 2010

Yep it updated to the latest 9.whatever and lost the playlists again, now I booted it up and it lost them again as it asks for an update to version 10.

I mean all the music is there, but I have to reimport it all again and oh look it can't find the album artwork for something I bought from the Apple Store because they no longer sell it. I'm also trying to discover why it's filing a single folder with three songs in it (one from disc 1 and two from disc 2) as two separate items not even next to each other in the album list! For some reason I have three "Various Artists" that follow on from bands beginning with "W"

Ah solved it. Despite appearing under "Various Artists" and being stored by iTunes in the "Various Artists" folder the Info pane belonging to them wasn't tagged as "Various Artists". Oh that makes sense.

ooh, help me undo my idiot error of stopping imports duplicating into WMP. now all i got , cos of my crap n900 phone, is itunes metafiles and the accompanying music files are now all .ovi music files and not recognised by anything at all????? apparently the only thing i can do is uninstall/reinstall itunes. but that'll mean 10gig of stuff to reload and of course one doesn't have it all does one.

Okay I'm going to need some more information there. Ovi I know is that crap bit of software from Nokia that tried to upload DaBoss's entire music library to the 'net, but I've not heard of a .ovi music file.

Checking the specs the N900 uses .mp3, .wma, .aac, .m4a and .wav and iTunes should be happy with the lot (except wma).

In theory all your music files should still be there so it's a case of cleaning out the library (keep files) and reimporting them rather than reinstalling iTunes

Perhaps each of the music libraries is set to organise your music; that could move the files about a bit.

ah ok bit more digging and it seems that the properties show them as m4a.'s but are listed in the folders as nokia music manager. in itunes the kind is AAC but in the where bit they show as mainly m4a. is that the same thing? until i uninstalled Ovi.player [which installed automatically from the phone]it kept converting perfectly good mp3's etc and itunes imports. is that the aac bit?

it all seems to be in the itunes music folder, except some other downloads sitting in music but not properly put into itunes yet.

will i just delete the 3 library folders and previous library.

I should explain that I was trying to move everything into wmp and lose itunes so i could get something else that is actually synchro'able with my phone. problem is my phone is not even compatible with nokia pcsuite or Ovi etc. help. have some itunes downloads too. looking to use the analogue loophole for that i suppose. sorry about these simple q's flip

Right so it shows up as AAC but the file itself is an .m4a; that makes sense. Imagine buying a Marathon bar and a Snickers bar - different wrappers same contents.

In the same context an .mp3 is a Mars bar which may be why Music Manager was converting them.

In terms of using WMP instead of iTunes guess which one doesn't recognise .m4a files? Well yeah it's WMP.

So you can either convert everything to .mp3 using iTunes (possibly with some loss of quality) so as to be compatible with WMP and then dig out the settings for Music Manager that stops it from converting them; or you can keep iTunes and the .m4a files and convert any remaining .mp3 files again using iTunes.

I can guide you through either step depending on which way you want to go.